John Williamson’s text (“Lowest Common Denominator or Neoliberal Manifesto? The Polemics of the Washington Consensus” in R M Auty & J F J Toye, eds, Challenging the Orthodoxies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996) 13) focuses on a set of policies he originally labelled as the Washington Consensus, which many have subsequently called a “neoliberal manifesto.” Other than an antagonistic reference to the policies put in place by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s, his account is not concerned with the role of power and politics; in fact, he characterizes the economic policies he identified precisely as non-ideological and non-political. In particular, he saw these policies through the eyes of an engineer: there was a problem, and everyone –and especially Latin American economists–saw the adoption of these policies as a solution.
Duménil and Lévy (The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011), ch 1) offer a Marxist approach rooted in the politics of class conflict. Beyond the familiar dichotomy between capital and labour, these French authors introduce instead a distinction between capitalist, managerial and popular classes. They define neoliberalism as a new stage of capitalism, one which has displaced the post-World War II alliance between managers and the popular classes, in favour of another joining the interests of capitalists and the managerial classes. The resulting institutional matrix, born in the U.S., has been imposed on the global periphery through “straightforward economic violence, corruption, subversion and war.” However, the process of exporting neoliberalism has created severe tensions within the US: the unfettered quest for high income for the upper classes has acted against the growth of the domestic economy. While these conflicting trends passed relatively unnoticed through the 1990s, the 2007-2008 financial crisis brought its implications to the fore.
Mark Blyth’s analysis (“One Ring to Bind Them All: American Power and Neoliberal Capitalism” in Jeffrey Kopstein & Sven Steinmo, eds., Growing Apart: America and Europe in the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2007)) shares concern with the ways that power mediates the global fortunes of neoliberal policies, but turns on international relations rather than class alliances. By setting aside Duménil and Lévy’s effort to fit neoliberalism into a broader historical narrative of capitalism and its crises, Blyth creates more room for comparative politics and empirical attention to the divergent policy pathways that have been gathered together under the neoliberal label. According to Blyth, policies cannot simply be imposed from above but necessitate an element of consensus and agreement. Central to his argument is “skin deep neoliberalism,” the notion of that European countries ‘talk the talk without walking the walk,’ a reality that he uses to make a larger argument about waning U.S. hegemony.
Suggested further readings
- David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- Gérard Duménil & Dominique Lévy, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
- Greta R Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: the Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011).
- Wolfgang Streeck, “The Crisis in Context: Democratic Capitalism and its Contradictions” in Armin Schäfer & Wolfgang Streeck, eds, Politics in the Age of Austerity (Cambridge: Polity, 2013) 262.
- Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London ; New York: Verso, 2013).
- Sarah L Babb, Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
- Dorothee Bohle, “Neoliberalism, Embedded Neoliberalism and Neocorporatism: Towards Transnational Capitalism in Central-Eastern Europe” (2007) 30:3 West European politics 443.
- Dorothee Bohle, “Neoliberal Hegemony, Transnational Capital and the Terms of the EU’s Eastward Expansion” (2006) 30:1 Capital & Class 57.